Pregnant with Fear.

It’s been almost a year now since our lives turned upside down.

I’ve been sitting with that for weeks, turning it over, trying to work out how to write about it without either flattening it into something tidy or letting it swallow me whole again. So I’m just going to tell it as it happened, and let it be as messy as it actually was.

Greta was our eighth embryo transfer. We started trying for a sibling for Mila when she was just eighteen months old. She didn’t become a big sister until she was four.

In between sat two and a half years of heartbreak I still don’t have adequate language for. The kind that reshapes you quietly, without asking permission. So when the positive test finally came, in May last year, confirmed on Mother’s Day of all days, Lucy and I held it so carefully. We didn’t say it out loud, not really, not in the way you’d expect two people to celebrate news they’d spent years praying for. We’d learned the hard way not to count anything before it was safely, truly ours.

For a while, it seemed like maybe this time it would be. The early bloodwork was in our favour. The genetic testing came back all clear. We found out we were having a girl, a sister for Mila, and I remember tucking her into bed one night not long after, crying quietly as her small hand rested on my belly. “Are they happy tears, Mumma?” she asked. I told her they were. I told her all of my dreams were coming true. I have always pictured a house full of girls.

Then came an ordinary appointment that stopped being ordinary within about ninety seconds. A quick look at the baby on a non-diagnostic machine, just for fun, and the screen showed something that made my stomach drop before my brain had even caught up. I knew, on some instinctive level, that what I was looking at wasn’t right.